Differential evolution-based resource allocation for D2D communications in cellular networks with system capacity and fairness tradeoff

Spectrum resources are becoming increasingly scarce with the explosive growth of communication requirements. Introducing Device-to-Device (D2D) communication technology into cellular networks is a feasible solution to enhance spectral efficiency. However, potential performance degradation caused by severe interference between cellular and D2D links is a pressing and thorny issue that needs to be addressed. This paper investigates the joint channel allocation and power control problem for D2D communications in cellular networks, proposing a joint channel-power allocation strategy based on the Differential Evolution (DE) algorithm to achieve a tradeoff between system capacity and fairness. The resource allocation problem is first converted into an integer programming problem with constrained boundaries, which has been proven to be NP-hard. Subsequently, a novel fitness function is designed, which introduces the Jain's Fairness Index based on user satisfaction and a special penalty factor, thereby achieving a balance between system capacity and fairness. Simulation results indicate that the proposed algorithm not only effectively optimizes the fitness function with partial channel state information (CSI), but also significantly outperforms the Simulated Annealing (SA) algorithm.